Thursday, March 25, 2010

Finally!

I am so happy because we were able to break ground on our garden yesterday. We have been waiting on pins and needles, hoping every day there would be sun and -- finally just enough to get a start. The dirt was a little clumpy, but not too bad. Hopefully we can get a few new plants into the ground in the next day or so. The forecast is not totally promising but we are encouraged by getting this far.

We have some plants that have survived the winter. Most of it is garlic and there are some leeks. The green leafy plants are parsnips and we will see if they continue to grow.

We moved our garlic row last season but failed to dig up all of it and some garlic grew in our lettuce row. My sister thinks we can use this to our advantage. We still have some lettuce growing amid the spikes of volunteer garlic and she thinks that garlic could help keep the bugs from our lettuce. I think that is a great idea. We are going to let that row be a "companion" row and plant new lettuce among the garlic. Since we will be planting wide rows, it should be perfect.

In the upper left hand corner of the photo above, there are some carrots that look pretty good. We will either leave them there or transplant them into another row. We do have some cauliflower plants that have grown all winter and today I noticed a few of them were heading. Unfortunately, some geese have found them, too. My husband added an extra strand of wire to the electric fence to better keep them out of the garden. I don't know if that will work. We will probably add one more at the bottom in hopes that the geese will get a big jolt the next time they try to trespass.

Isn't that a great start? We weren't as early as we had hoped and have missed our early crop, but for most of our summer vegetables we are a little ahead of schedule. Spring really is here.